Karma - what comes around goes around!

Since I got sober I’ve been pretty good at maintaining my serenity with a few exceptions. The biggest exception is when I’m driving. I still lose my patience and get irritated while driving. Be it a slow driver in the fast lane, people who don’t signal or general commuter chaos I try my best to stay calm but don’t always pull it off. I know it is progress rather than perfection but my progress in this area has been very slow. When the frustration takes ahold of me what usually happens is I start shouting and swearing. My window isn’t open or anything, I’m just shouting and swearing to myself but I lose it!

I was commuting home the other day when traffic came to a chaotic standstill. A police vehicle was blocking traffic and not doing a very good job of directing it. Motorists were trying to get around the obstruction in various ways but there was no rhyme or reason to what they were doing. My frustration level blew a gasket and I began to swear up a storm inside my car. When I finally made my way through the intersection I saw that there had been a bad accident.

The next day I was commuting to work when I had to stop as the motorist in front of me was waiting for traffic to ease up so she could make a left-hand turn. It was one lane either way. The impatient part of me wanted to go onto the shoulder of the road to get around but the patient part of me won out and decided to wait until the motorist turned. As I sat there waiting I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw a SUV quickly approaching. My first thought was, “Fuck! That guy ain’t going to stop”, my second thought was, “what should I do?” There was no time for a third thought for that was when the guy smashed into me. I estimate he was going around 90 km/hour (even though he told the cop he was going 60). My car spun around several times, I have no recollection if I hit the car in front of me, and ended ass end in a pole, facing the opposite direction of oncoming traffic. Needless to say I suffered some injuries (back, neck, stomach, and leg muscles) and have to do a few months of physio.

I’m a firm believer in karma. What comes around goes around. What I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out is whether or not my impatience over the traffic delays caused by the accident, I wasn’t involved in, set into motion some bad karma. Did that bad karma have something to do with my own accident the day after? I like to think it didn’t but am not so sure.

Dave the Dude